


Breathe Easy

by Laily



Series: All My Frostiron : In Love & War [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avenger Loki (Marvel), BAMF Tony Stark, Drama, Established Relationship, FebuWhump2021, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Procedures, Protective Tony Stark, Some Plot, Stephen Strange is a Good Bro, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:41:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29402142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laily/pseuds/Laily
Summary: Tony and Loki were looking forward to celebrating Valentine's Day properly this year. So far it hasn't happened.Fill fic for Febuwhump 2021 Prompt Day 17: Field Surgery
Relationships: Loki/Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Stephen Strange
Series: All My Frostiron : In Love & War [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1976677
Comments: 25
Kudos: 106





	Breathe Easy

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: there is some medical drama ahead, so if you're squeamish, proceed with caution. No, there isn't much blood or anything. (Reassuring, huh?)

"Why are you breathing like that?" Tony snapped. "Stop breathing like that!"

"It'd be easier - to stop - " Loki wheezed, "breathing altogether."

"Are you trying to be funny?" Tony seethed. 

"Hah!" Loki let out a chortle that sounded too painful not to be an expression of suppressed agony, evidenced by the sudden buckling of his knees.

Tony lunged forward and caught the Asgardian's toppling frame before he could inhale a faceful of sand. "Loki!"

"Finally," Loki rasped in between coughs. "Don't think I've ever heard you call me that before - "

A coughing fit drove all breath out of him, eerily silent despite the violent seizing of his chest.

"Are you choking? Is that what's happening?" Tony's hands hovered over Loki's quivering back, unsure if he should thump it or rub it or whatever the hell one was supposed to do in this sort of situation -

Call someone! Tony thought. I should call someone.

"FRIDAY!" He shouted. "Get Banner on the phone now!"

"Doctor Banner is away on a humanitarian relief mission in the Middle East, Boss," the AI answered. "He is currently unreachable. Would you like to leave him a voice message?"

Loki was not going to like this, but Tony was running low on options. "Well, get me Doctor Strange, then! Or is he out freelancing too?"

"No…" Loki moaned. 

"Doctor Strange is on the line for you, Boss."

"Stephen!" Tony shouted in relief.

"What is it, Stark?" An irate-looking holographic live image of Stephen Strange popped up. "What is going on? Where the hell are you?"

"Not important. Loki needs help."

"What kind of help?" the Sorcerer Supreme asked warily.

"I don't know! He's having trouble breathing, and before you ask, no, it's not from a spell or a curse. It's a work-related injury, caused by aliens and sheer stupidity." 

Tony tried to glare at his lover but at the sight of Loki writhing on the ground, his anxiety won out.

"Please, you gotta help him," he pleaded.

"Tony, I am thousands of miles away in Kathmandu. I'm kind of in the middle of a crisis myself," Stephen said with a voice tinged with desperation. "I can try to wrap things up here, but it's going to be a while."

The sounds of Loki coughing must have caught the sorcerer-doctor's attention when he suddenly winced, "Is he coughing up blood?"

"No!" Tony looked again, and blanched at the sight of blood spattered on the desert floor like paint. "Yes! Oh fu- " 

"Stark, calm down. How much blood?"

"What do you mean, how much?" Tony's voice shrilled. "There's blood, isn't that enough?"

"Expose his chest, I need you to tell me what you see," Stephen ordered.

Tony did as he was told, ripping away Loki's mangled chest plate and tearing all the layers of protective leather underneath.

"Any visible chest wounds?"

"No, none that I can see."

"Rib - fracture," Loki gasped. "Felt it crack."

"Loki's saying it's a rib fracture, said he felt it crack."

"Chest pain?"

"Yeah. A great deal of it, from the looks of him," Tony said worriedly.

"You mentioned breathlessness?"

"Uhuh. He can hardly breathe," Tony said. Surely Stephen could hear Loki's desperate gasps from all the way there in the Himalayas. 

"Are both sides of the chest rising equally?"

Tony scrutinised Loki's black and blue torso. "The left side isn't rising at all."

"Okay. It could be a number of things, a flail chest or a collapsed lung, but a pneumothorax will kill you the fastest, so now I want you to feel his trachea."

"Let's just forget my insane IQ for a second and pretend that I'm very, very stupid," Tony growled. "How and what do I feel?"

"His windpipe, Tony!" Stephen said in exasperation. "Feel his throat with your index and middle fingers and tell me if it's central or deviated to any one side!" 

"Can't you doctor people speak like a normal person?" Tony groused.

He traced his fingers down Loki's neck as gently as he could. In his distress, Loki had thrown his head all the way back and his neck muscles were contorting under the strain but the displacement of his Adam's apple was obvious.

"The windpipe's deviated, yeah." 

"To which side?"

"To the left."

Tony could sense Stephen's impending relief, as well as the hope in his next question. "Whose left, yours or his?"

"Uh, mine?"

Tony heard Stephen curse under his breath. "Goddamnit, Stark, it's always the patient's right or the patient's left!"

"And I was supposed to know that how??" 

Stephen ignored the indignant outburst. "There's no time to lose."

"Wh-What is it?" Tony grew frantic at the sudden change in his friend's voice.

"This is one of those life-threatening emergencies most of us don't get to see in all our career, so...congratulations." 

Despite the light humour, the former surgeon sounded deadly serious. "And you need to listen to me very, very carefully coz you're gonna be the one to fix it."

"Fix what?" Tony's mouth felt suddenly dry. He had a mental image of cracking open Loki's chest and he felt instantly sickened. 

"It's a tension pneumothorax, Tony. Most likely scenario is the fractured rib punctured a lung, causing air to leak into the space between the lungs and the chest wall. But it's a one-way valve, and all that air is trapped inside his thorax with nowhere to go."

Tony swallowed hard. "That sounds bad."

"It's very bad," Stephen agreed reluctantly. "If you don't release the trapped air, all that pressure will compress his heart, his aorta - "

"Yeah, I get it," Tony interrupted. He did not want to hear Stephen say it; he could see it in Loki's eyes, glassy and damp with fear. 

He had only ever seen lips that blue on corpses. 

He had only just kissed those lips this morning, right before the Quinjet dropped them off in the middle of the Mojave Desert following a tip-off that the rogue Kree soldiers they were looking for were holed up somewhere here. 

Powered by technology siphoned off the Tesseract, the Kree's advanced weaponry had stunned Tony to the point of paralysis; if it had not been for Loki stepping into the line of fire, he would not be alive right now. 

"You can't wait for me, Tony," Stephen stressed. "He won't make it before I get there." 

"I know," Tony said softly. "Tell me what to do."

He listened to Stephen's instructions. A part of him protested at the thought of hurting Loki further, but he knew it had to be done. 

He groped down the side of Loki's ankle strap where he knew Loki kept a small knife on him at all times.

"Do you trust me?" Tony asked quietly. 

Loki nodded feverishly, never breaking eye contact, fearful to even blink. 

_Do what you must_ , the unnaturally bright green eyes seemed to say.

Tony's own eyes watered. "I love you."

 _I love you,_ Loki's bloodless lips worked silently around the words, but Tony heard them all the same. 

He leaned down for a kiss as cold as ice. 

The taste of blood galvanised him and he ran his fingers down Loki's breastbone, looking for the dip in between the second and third ribs. 

"Midclavicular line," Tony muttered, following the space between ribs as instructed, reminding himself of the landmark Stephen had repeated over and over. "Aim below the second rib, in the midclavicular line..."

And Tony slid the knife in.

"That's it. Go a little further. It's alright, just keep going until you hear a pop or a hiss…."

Tony could hear Stephen egging him on in the background, but it was all white noise. All he cared about was getting Loki to breathe again. 

Suddenly there was an audible whoosh of air as though a balloon was being slowly deflated, but nothing was more beautiful than the sound of Loki gasping in a full breath, the first ever since Tony had dug him out from under the rubble of the Kree mothership Loki had destroyed in his wrath.

Stephen let out an uncharacteristic cheer over the connection, sounding mighty pleased with both himself and his student. "Well done, Stark!" 

"Yeah." Tony's head swam and he sank heavily onto the ground, Loki's bloodied knife dropping and disappearing into a shrub. "I did it. I can't believe it."

"Feels great, doesn't it?" There was envy in Stephen's voice that Tony did not quite understand but couldn't care less about, not at this very moment. 

He walked his knees across the dust and gathered Loki into his arms, trembling limbs and fractured ribs and all.

"Loki." Tony ran his fingers through the dusty curls to try to shake off all the trapped sand. "Loki."

"I'm here," Loki said, sounding absolutely and utterly exhausted. He wrapped his arms around the metal arm, the one closest to him and holding him for dear life. "I'm here, Tony."

"This is the shittiest Valentine ever," Tony said, his voice cracking ever so slightly. 

Loki chuckled weakly. Each breath was now easier than the one before. "I'm sure there are people out there who are having a worse Valentine's Day than us."

"You think so?"

"I know so," Loki sighed into Tony's chest. "They don't have _you."_

"You scared me, Games."

"And I am going to scare you again, I'm sure. But never intentionally."

Loki gazed up at his saviour, his reason for living, his _heart_. "This I promise you."

Tony calmed as the adrenaline finally left him and the love flooded in in its wake. 

"Good enough for me, Bambi."

He bent down once more for a kiss, sweet, long and tender. 

"Happy Valentine's Day, Baby."

"Happy Valentine's Day, Anthony."

**Author's Note:**

> Since it's already Valentine's Day where I am. 😉
> 
> I know V-Day fics aren't supposed to be whumpy but I can never help myself.


End file.
